minions of the Severus took me down and laid me out to be healed, not in a hospital, but in a kind of morgue. I rested for a long time in a metal drawer, dreaming in the darkness, imagining that my body was a cloth dummy, a sack stuffed with sand, and the sand, which was both my pain and my life, trickled out through countless rips and tears, rattling down through the drawers below me. In my dreams I tried to figure out why I had been rejected, and felt weirdly disappointed that I had been found unworthy.
The drawer opened. Hands lifted me up.
“Thou art not the true Stephanus,” the Severus boomed. “Therefore be cast out. Return unto him as a sign of our summoning and our wrath.”
I felt myself heaved through the air, falling from darkness into light. I braced myself against the impact that never came. Naked, so light-headed I seemed to float, my skeletal limbs fumbling every-which-way, I staggered down the front stairs of Stephen Taylor’s house.
I was the hero of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, returned from Faerie…the gift and burden of wisdom—
Down, into the kitchen, as if no time at all had passed, to confront the greatest liar of them all, whose lies could create universes because he truly believed them.
It was time for a bit of skepticism.
“Stephen!” I shouted. “You’re fucking insane. There’s nothing up there. It’s all a delusion. Show’s over. You’re free.”
Such were the ravings of a palpable fraud. But Stephen wasn’t listening. When I got into the kitchen, I found my plane tickets. My luggage was still in the living room by the door where he’d been unable to lift it. Stephen Taylor was gone. He didn’t even leave a thank-you note.
* * * *
Christ, what a ridiculous ending.
Back in California, it was hard to re-establish my identity, for I was so changed, greatly aged, half my former weight, and I’d only been gone—as it turned out—thirteen weeks. You’re looking for some significance in that number. Go ahead. I can’t find it. My wife wouldn’t look into my face. I couldn’t even attempt to explain, and I could never, never undress in front of her, revealing the terrible scars that covered my body.
But she could see the marks on my wrists, and where the hand of the Severus had seared my face. I can’t blame her that she left with the kids and told them their father was dead. When confronted with the inexplicable, we can only tell lies.
And what is truth? said jesting Pilate.
You got me. Ask Steve. Maybe he can help you.
* * * *
At the university, my colleagues kept taking me aside with horrified sympathy and asking—not really wanting an answer—if there was anything they could do. The Department Head offered me indefinite leave with pay, more than once. Like everyone else, he explained the weight-loss as the onset of AIDS and was wondering why I took so long to die. But no, I had only my work, or else I’d be alone and helpless with the mysteries.
Christ, the ending—
Reclusive artist Stephen Taylor, dead of a heart attack at forty. I read your obituary in the New York Times. So our friendship, if that’s what it ever was, begins and ends with newspapers. At least you had a couple good years, Stephen. I understand you even married. And your last work, the Prison Etchings, were Fine Art, rivaling Piranesi. There is something serene, almost sublime in those endless, twisting stairways and corridors of prisons where only shadows and dust remain, from which both jailers and prisoners have long since departed.
Stephen, I’d like to believe that you set me up, that everything, from that envelope at the door of the college newspaper office to your seemingly premature death, was meticulously calculated, part of an infinitely ingenious jailbreak.
If you made it, maybe something makes sense.
Stephen, I am writing this for you, to be published or to be burned, to make it true or to expose it as one last ridiculous fantasy. I’m not sure which.
THE SORCERER EVORAGDOU
When I was ten, a naked, mad boy came into our village, proclaiming the advent of the sorcerer Evoragdou. I remember how frightened I was of that boy, though he couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than me. He was so emaciated, so filthy, so burnt by the sun that he seemed less a human being than a piece of driftwood inexplicably come alive.
“Evoragdou,” was all he would say, in a kind of delirium. “Evoragdou shall dwell in this place.”
In time the women fed him, washed him, gave him clothes, and took him away.
I asked my father what all this meant, and he merely said, “The sun has destroyed his mind.”
“Who is Evoragdou?”
“There is no such person,” my father said, very sternly. I didn’t think he believed that he was saying. He was hiding his own fear.
* * * *
Two months later, I wandered out in the night, to answer the call of nature, then to stare at the dark sky and make up stories about what I saw there.
I walked for a ways, across the rickety wooden bridge over the irrigation canal, then between the rows of newly planted grain, careful of my step. The heavens were clear and moonless, the millions of stars like the sparks of some enormous forge, frozen in time. I could never be lost in the darkness, because the Great River was behind me and the desert before me. Besides, I knew my way among the stars.
I was hungry for a miracle. Pridefully, almost arrogantly, I longed to be the special one to whom visions came, who beheld the gods leaning to whisper to one another where they sat seated like vast and looming clouds, behind the stars.
It never occurred to me that the mad boy might have had his own share of miracles, that they had transformed him and could transform me. No, I wanted mine. Now.
But instead of any vision of gods, the stars themselves rippled like lights reflected in wind-swept water, and a third of the entire sky was blotted out.
Suddenly, I was standing on the doorstep of an enormous wooden building, vaster than anything I’d ever imagined could be built. With a yell, I fell back, then scrambled to my feet and ran a distance off to hide in a clump of tall grass by a water channel. There I crouched, wide-eyed, watching, listening as the fantastic house began to shift and change, its timbers creaking, groaning, shuddering, as if a living monster, not a wooden structure at all, were stirring from sleep.
There, as had been foretold, undoubtedly and undeniably, was the dwelling of the sorcerer Evoragdou.
Towers rose like slowly stretching arms. The windows opened, like eyes, black and sightless. A corner swelled outward, becoming a turret with a gleaming, glass dome on top, sparkling in the starlight.
Truly this was as great a miracle as anyone could hope for, but I waited in greedy expectation for something more to happen.
Toward dawn, something did: A door opened onto a balcony far above, and a silver-bearded man in a flowing robe came out. What seemed to be a living flame flickered in the outstretched palm of his hand. It was enough to illuminate his face, but I couldn’t see the rest of him clearly. He might have worn a fine gown, or rags.
Slowly he turned, from side to side, holding up his light, as if searching for something.
I crouched very still.
Then he spoke just a few words, which made me very much afraid and sent me scurrying away through the mud on my belly in a ridiculous attempt to avoid being seen. I wanted to cry out, but I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood, and remained silent, as if somehow in silence I could still deny what I had heard.
At the edge of the village I got up and started running. I arrived home screaming like the mad boy who had come before.
* * * *
That morning, everyone went to see the sorcerer’s house, but stood a safe distance away. I